The Dark Elf
by what'sherface707
Summary: Oneshot. Malekith sometimes hears a little voice in the back of his mind, speaking of a Time War and blue boxes and this lovely blonde companion. DISCLAIMER: Don't own.


Darkness was the friend of Malekith. And the Aether would bring it back to him.

Oh, the universe blazed brightly. It blotted out the dark matter and burned everything it touched. Stars and planets and nebulae, all scorching proof of their existence throughout the expanse of reality. And he would destroy it, despite the voice in the back of his mind that had lodged itself there from the day of his genesis.

The great battle on Svartalfheim between the Asgardians and King Bor and his own force of Dark Elves was only a prelude to the great destruction yet to arrive. The pinnacle of Aether stood behind him. His commander Algrim stood by his side. Malekith looked up. There were the worlds, hovering over like great haloes. They would die. He saw Midgard, called Earth, and heard it again. That one small part of him that insisted he was not Malekith, he was not a Dark Elf, and he did not want to destroy this lovely universe with all its life. He shook his head. The darkness would welcome him back.

Then the Asgardians took the Aether and the Kursed failed him and he escaped into his last blade-like ship with as many Elves as he could, knowing he had condemned the rest of his race to death.

_We're destined to destroy our species no matter which universe we're in, I suppose, _that voice said. His voice. But not his voice.

Malekith knew the Aether could not be destroyed by any force of these worlds, knew the Asgardians would hide it, knew that it must be found again at the next Convergence because the Aether could not be contained. So he slept. He and Algrim and all the remaining Elves went into suspended animation. Malekith slept. And he dreamed.

An orange planet and an old man and a long scarf and traveling and a ridiculously coloured coat and a War.

He dreamt of when he was younger. Back when there was only darkness and the Aether flowed throughout the universe. Back when the Dark Elves were a mighty and sophisticated race. Malekith had fought his way to the top. They competed in games, the growing Dark Elves. There was a coming-of-age game, when young Elves would fly for the first time. Each would have a small ship to pilot. They would dart around each other in a giant arena, and the last nine to survive would be the winners. He had taken to this eagerly, cutting down the ships around him with an ease that impressed the commanders of the time.

_Not as good a ship as mine, _the voice had grumbled. _That gravity pulsoroid is rubbish and the sliding nanoreamers have nothing on my ship. Impressive driving though. We have a penchant for picking up this sort of stuff immediately. _Malekith had shaken it off and crashed another opponent.

The voice whispered throughout his dreams. Rarely did it address him directly. Sometimes it sang of great adventures. Sometimes it screamed in clearly-remembered agony. _No more _was something it seemed to repeat, over and over and over. Sometimes it seemed to be asleep as well, muttering phrases of things that made no sense to the Dark Elf.

Faces. So many faces for only one man!

_Brave heart, Malekith, _it said, doing a rubbish imitation of another's voice. It went on, impersonating a new voice with each scrambled phrase. _Good things come to those who wait in small packages. There's no point in being grown up if you can't act a little childish sometimes. Reverse the polarity of fantastic… _It seemed to be going mad. The Dark Elf wondered if he would be dragged into insanity as well. A disturbing thought.

Darkness was Malekith's bed, and he festered in it. Only while he slept did he fully realize what he had done. He had destroyed everything. Svartalfheim had become a forest of jagged ruins. Thousands of Elves had died. He would be remembered as a coward, a betrayer, and a destroyer of worlds. The one who fled the battle for safety, leaving everyone behind for a buffer while he saved his own skin. He hated it. Malekith screamed in anguish in his mind. _You do not know how much I've sacrificed!_

_Yeah, well, tough! _the voice snapped. _I do know, I was right there with you. _It fell silent for a second, seeming to brood on something. _And I've done worse than you. Much worse. So stuff it!_

Centuries passed. A thousand years went by, then two. Three. The voice had quieted after the first millennium, hibernating. Then it spoke again. _You know we'll both go insane from sleeping this long._

The Dark Elf thought back at it, _I lived for ages before the light came, and I can live for eons more._

_But it's not natural. A living brain is designed to go through periods of activity and rest. It can't handle the stress of being forced into dormancy for so long. This stasis you've put yourself in will kill you, whether it finally sends your mind to sleep for good or makes your psyche implode from the pressure of keeping it asleep._

_We are not fools that we go into a wait-sleep without knowing the risks!_

_Most suspended animation I've seen downloads the mind into a thought web, where it can exercise itself for brief periods. Yours simply has the brain patterns dampened. This is short-sighted technology. It was designed for a sleep of, what, ten, twenty years? Not millennium. Your people weren't as grand as you thought they were. Ha! _It chuckled. _The opposite for me._

He did not reply to the voice for a long time. _If I die, then you die with me._

_Ah, see, that's not quite true, _it rebuffed cheerfully. _You might be older than this splinter of me by a thousand years or so, but I'll live on._

Malekith did not believe its claim.

_Broken technology, you see, _the voice explained. _After the War, every boundary and safeguard meant to keep my people in only one universe failed. A copy of me might be in every dimension now. _It paused, pondering. _That's how I'll live on. Through other versions of myself. And through the one I was originally. Though you are right in one respect—if you go crazy, you'll drag me down with you._

Malekith slept for over five thousand years. He kept track subconsciously. The voice always seemed to know exactly how much time had passed. Then there was life and there was waking and the Aether was calling him, calling him strongly and drowning out the voice. He set his course for Asgard. There was a human there. The Aether coursed through her veins and shrieked through her mind.

The voice moaned. _Stupid ape!_

And as it ranted about how humans always managed to make it so easy for evil, Malekith stabbed Algrim and gave him the last Kursed stone. His faithful lieutenant. He would be remembered with reverence.

And so the last ship of the Dark Elves disappeared into the dark space. _Chameleon circuit,_ he started to think. But no, that was the voice's name for it. It worried him, that maybe soon he would not be able to tell the voice and his own thoughts apart. Maybe they were more alike than he thought.

Malekith sent out forerunners, smaller ships to attack Asgard. He deposited the Kursed Algrim in a party of arrested Vanaheimians, being marched into the dungeons. He focused on the Aether's call, and he waited. Crouched in the middle of his plan like a devious spider in the midst of her web, Malekith watched, tugging on a strand here and loosening a knot there, so that every piece of his master puzzle would fall together perfectly.

_Who do you think you are, eh? The last of the Racnoss?_ A new voice! Younger, and different, and impossible! Malekith shut his eyes and concentrated. While he dreamed, he had heard the voice-that-was-not-his-voice mimic the sound of others, but never had he heard a truly different voice!

_Shut it, you, _the voice-that-was-not-his-voice said to the young-and-impossible-voice. _I haven't even become you yet._ And that was the last of the young-and-impossible-voice.

Then his scouts were attacking and the shield was destroyed and Malekith stopped listening and made his way into the palace of Asgard.

He boarded one of the smaller ships with a force of Dark Elves. They all waited in the dark through the crashes and rumblings outside. Then the doors opened and the Elves attacked and Malekith slipped off to find his Aether.

_Asgard really is quite beautiful. I went to a picnic here once. Or I will, _the voice pondered. The Elf paid no heed to its ramblings. _Pity you're planning to destroy it._

He found Algrim and they made their way to the Aether. There was the Midgardian and then there was the queen and she rounded the pool with a dagger in her hand. He was impressed with Frigga's bravery, but underwhelmed by the girl's courage as she stumbled off to the side in fear. They traded barbs, and they fought, and Frigga was good with her dagger. Malekith was knocked to the ground. Algrim attacked the queen and held her as the Dark Elf approached the woman, Jane Foster, and reached out for his Aether—

Only to have Jane dissolve into a hologram and disappear.

_Ha ha! _the voice crowed. _Good old humanoids, always thinking of something clever at the last minute! Fantastic!_

Malekith asked the queen where the Midgardian was. Frigga said she'd never tell. He believed her.

_Malekith, _it warned. _No, you can't do this. No. Don't do it!_

Algrim stabbed her.

_NO!_

A blast of heat shot from behind him hit Malekith on the side of his face. He stumbled back, feeling like his skin was burning. He couldn't see out of his right eye. He heard a great cry of grief and rage. Algrim grabbed him, and they leaped off the side of the balcony and into the ship. Soon they had teleported back into the dark spaces of the universe. His lieutenant took him to the helm and put him in the stasis machine and told him to heal.

The voice was stony and cold in the back of his mind. _You are nothing like me, _it said before going quiet for a long time.

Again Malekith slept. Even in his dreams he felt the rough, charred skin. The line between his own thoughts and the voice's private musings seemed to blur, even more than they had while the Dark Elves waited for the Aether to wake. He saw ten faces, all very different and yet so much the same, flashing together in quick succession. He saw a great glass dome, shattered. He saw people spreading out their arms and exploding into golden light. He saw a great rip in the sky with something swirling within that was too terrible to behold. Several times he woke, shivering, because of this image. Malekith seemed to be experiencing the voice's memories.

After again seeing the awful chasm, the Dark Elf thought, _Who are you to have survived so many things that I cannot even look at?_

The voice did not answer him.

Malekith still felt the Aether. It was growing beyond the human girl's capacity to contain it. She would burn soon if he did not retrieve the energy. At that idea, he sensed an impression of a blonde girl with golden eyes and a soul not of Midgard filling her body, stretching out a hand to finish a War. He had seen that face before in the voice's dreams. Malekith shook it off. _Those are not my memories and that is not my life._

Then the Aether moved. Moved to Svartalfheim, of all the worlds. He woke and Algrim told him that they should strike at Asgard again, while they were still weak. Malekith told him that Asgard was nothing. The Aether had come home.

The Dark Elves landed on their home planet. It was still as Malekith remembered, except for the half-crumbled husks of his kinsmen and their armor. Even thousands of years after the great battle, they remained as a testament to the deaths.

There were figures on the ridge before them. One sent the other tumbling down the slope, and the girl followed. Malekith recognized the second figure as the prince of Asgard. Thor. The one Algrim said had burned his face. The Dark Elves watched as the other, Loki Laufeyson, attacked him and cut off his hand. He grabbed Jane and hauled her before Malekith. He said he gave the Aether back as long as he was provided a good seat to watch the annihilation of Asgard. Algrim said he was an enemy of Asgard.

Any enemy of the Nine Realms was the friend of the Dark Elves.

Malekith held out his hand and answered the pull of the Aether. Jane Foster rose into the air. The energy crackling on the mental scale increased palpably. He closed his eyes, feeling drunk on the power of pure destruction, even though it had not entered him yet.

Then the Aether came out and Loki grabbed Jane and Thor had his hand back and blasted the Aether into shards of ruby-red glass.

He did not waver. The fools thought they had destroyed a force that was destruction itself. The pieces rose into the air, trembling. Some liquified and danced around his head. Then they rushed into Malekith, pouring down his throat and thundering through his mind. The presence of the voice, the little nudge he had felt since childhood, was swept away in the flood. He felt lost for a moment, and empty. But the Aether soon filled him. He knew everything. He was darkness, and death, and he would rain hell on the Nine Realms.

The Asgardian prince tried to challenge him. Malekith saw a million ways that he could kill Thor. He told them according to what the Aether showed him, that their family and their world would be extinguished.

He _had_ said extinguished. Not exterminated. That is not what he said. That was the voice, and the voice was gone. Only the Aether was in him now. He was the vessel for destruction. And as he turned back to his ship and his Elves went after Thor and Loki, Malekith tried desperately to forget the voice. Its ridiculous Midgardian accent. Its way of saying _Fantastic! _Its memories of a great and terrible War. He thought of the schism in the sky and jerked. _Sky trenches,_ he remembered.

By habit he waited for some sarcastic remark from the voice, but it didn't come. Malekith was shaken. He refused to show it. The Aether numbed him. The remainder of the Dark Elves boarded the ship and set a course for Midgard, over a land called England.

Blue boxes and silly accents and royalty and a three-colored flag and companions.

_Not my memories. Not my life. Not my memories. Not my life, _he chanted to himself. The Aether was dissolving him, his mind, and the voice was mixing with him.

They arrived, still invisible. Malekith needed destruction now, _now. _So he sent the end of his ship slicing through the ground. He would not need it. Puny Midgardians below panicked and ran in all directions. Again, as was during the battle against King Bor, there were worlds floating in the sky. Two small Midgardian ships flew towards him, releasing missiles, but both the ships and the missiles were flung by convoluted gravity into Vanaheim. Malekith stepped down the ramp of of his ship, reveling in the awesome power of the Aether. He did not look to see if anyone was around to watch him. He did not care. The power told him that Thor was coming for him. Malekith could crush the prince.

But Thor was stronger and more resilient than he expected. They engaged in a duel. Malekith whipped the Asgardian with the Aether. His hammer was no match for pure devastation. They battled back and forth. Out of the corner of his eye, the Dark Elf saw several humans rushing around, planting silver stakes in the ground. He paid them no heed. His soldiers would get them.

Malekith's Aether and Thor's lightning collided in midair. Then Malekith and Thor collided in midair. They tussled, and disappeared. A miniature portal had opened, throwing them into another realm. Thor was separated from his hammer, but kept fighting. Every few moments the two opponents would find themselves tumbling into a different world.

Finally, Malekith jerked away, falling to a Midgardian street. Thor disappeared in a portal. He could take advantage of this time and release the Aether. He stood and made his way back to the square, to his ship, to the lineup of the Nine Realms. He passed several Dark Elves finishing off any Midgardians that dared to come close. He watched, uninterested, as a handsome man in a dark trench coat and a rather advanced gun leapt in front of several cowering citizens and shot down a few Elves.

_Fixed point in time. Daleks. Game Station. Vortex manipulator. Face of Boe._

Malekith stopped with a jerk. That man was a man that the voice knew. The Aether pulled him towards the Convergence, but he didn't go. He watched, intensely curious now, as the man shouted at the Elves. He was a Time Agent, he said, and this wasn't how time was supposed to go. The Time Agency would— Malekith never heard what the Time Agency would do, because his soldiers had gunned the man down. He fell with a cry, his weapon clattering on the ground. An older woman shrieked behind him and stared, horrified, at the stranger who had postponed her death.

_Mother. Tyler. Pete's World. Domestic. Stupid ape._

Another the voice knew. Malekith barked at his Elves to move on, leave these Midgardians. They obeyed. Shocked, the three, clutching at each other, stared around. Malekith was partially hidden behind an overturned car, and so they did not see him when the male of the trio got up and tried to make a run for it. In a second, he was dead. Thrown against a pillar by a whip of Aether. Malekith paced out from behind the car and the woman screamed again. He paid her no heed, but looked at the body.

_Tin dog. Idiot. Boyfriend. Husband of the the doctor. Freedom fighter._

He did not bother to sneer. The dead one was not worth the effort.

He turned to face the remaining two. One was the screaming woman. She was sobbing on the ground now, clinging at the other's knees, begging her to come and run, hide, anything. But the other wouldn't. She stood tall, staring the Dark Elf in the eyes with a look of such intense loathing that he could swear he saw her eyes flash golden.

_Bad Wolf. Time and space. Battle of Canary Wharf. Pink and yellow human. Companion. Bad Wolf._

And indeed, there was a fallen billboard behind her, the words BAD WOLF scrawled across it in big letters.

_Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose._

The flow of emotion and memories was so strong that Malekith wanted to collapse, or cry, or both. His pale blue stare met hers, gleaming with gold, and he saw his own hesitation reflected in her eyes. They seemed to be experiencing the same thing in sync. First hatred, then confusion, then doubt. He saw her eyes widen a second before his did.

A leather jacket. Time. Last of his kind. A blue box. Big ears. The Last Great War. Two hearts. Traveling. Guilt and loneliness. Oh, but such wonder, when he found her, when she healed him, when he knew he would damn the universe to keep her safe.

_No! _he screamed inside. _No! I am Malekith of the Dark Elves and I am the host of the Aether and this girl means nothing to me!_

Rose swallowed and, with obvious effort, narrowed her gaze again. But her determination was underlined by the waver in her words when she told him he was a monster, by the fear of her reaction to this familiar stranger apparent in her stare. And his composure was betrayed by the slight accent that crept into his voice when he told her that he wished to be a monster, by the trembling of his clenched fists.

Malekith could barely feel the Aether now. It was just there, in the back of his mind, angry and quaking to get out and swallow the universe, but he was too focused on this. This life that he had not lived. This home that he had not been to. This girl that he had not loved.

Rose's bravery was fading, fast. She was shaking slightly and her face was pale. She licked her lips and started to say something.

"Do—"

"Rose Tyler," his hoarse voice cut her off.

Her eyes were definitely glowing golden now. She looked trepidatious and expectant.

He snarled. "I am not him. I am Malekith, I am a Dark Elf, and I am going to destroy the Nine Realms and let darkness reign again." He lashed out with the Aether and sent her flying back. He turned so as not to watch her land, though he heard the snap of something shattering.

Her mother shrieked and cried and crawled towards her daughter's body. Malekith let his uneasy grief be swept away in the flow of the Aether. _Unwanted and without cause._

He returned to his ship with a hard and heavy heart, more so even than when he had destroyed Svartalfheim to escape. Malekith raised his arms to the sky, as if saluting the Convergence, and released the Aether. He let go of himself as well, letting his sense of self get swept up into the flood, pouring, rushing, dancing, up, up into the sky, climbing towards the Nine Realms, streaming darkness and destruction.

Then Thor was wading through the whirlwind and Malekith was speared by one of the silver stakes the Midgardians had been using earlier. It shuddered and vanished, tearing away part of his body with it.

_There was no grinding, wheezing sound with dematerialization—_

But the Aether was powerful, and it grew back, and Thor was a fool to keep doing this.

_Regeneration, a whole new person in my place—_

Then the Asgardian threw his last spear and it pierced Malekith's chest and he found himself on the slopes of Svartalfheim—no, he was lying on the orange grass outside the Citadel, no, he was blasted to the ground in the ruins of Arcadia—and the Aether was rebuilding him—no, he was glowing, the Lindos hormone was flashing through his cells, he was regenerating, no, the Moment was burning Gallifrey, he was burning with all the children—and then his ship appeared above him, crumbling down to crush him.

Time seemed to slow. He heard his heartbeats. _Bum-bum-bum-bum. Bum-bum-bum-bum._ His mind was crystal clear. The Aether had no more hold on him. He saw Rose Tyler, his Rose, gleaming and golden and burning like a sun to say _No this is not goodbye_. And for one moment, one eternal moment, Malekith found peace. Because he _was_ the voice after all, and he vowed _Never cruel or cowardly. Never give in. Never give up._ The old Malekith had been swept away and now he found himself in the name of the Doctor.

_Come, _the image of the Bad Wolf whispered, holding out a hand. _Run away with me. Come see the stars._

The ship crashed on Malekith's body, so he took her hand and flew away. In his mind, he forever was the Doctor, who stole a TARDIS to see the stars, a mad man in a box travelling with his companion.


End file.
